malvertising

Online advertising is an integral part of today’s internet experience. In many ways, ads are the lifeblood behind many websites, providing the necessary funding to keep sites running, as well as supporting the creation of new content. While it may appear as though the ads that are displayed are just…

By Nick Biasini, Chris Neal and Matt Valites. Executive summary One of the trickiest challenges enterprises face is managing the balance between aggressively blocking malicious advertisements (aka malvertising) and allowing content to remain online, accessible for the average user. The days of insta…

This post was authored by Anna Shirokova and Ivan Nikolaev John Smith had a lot of friends and liked to travel. One day he got an email that read: “Money has been sent to your PayPal account”. The sender appeared to be a person he met from recent trip to Cape Town. John Smith was curious…

This blog authored by Nick Biasini. Exploit kits are a class of threat that indiscriminately aims to compromise all users. Talos has continued to monitor this threat over time resulting in large scale research and even resulting in a large scale takedown. The focus of this investigation is on the to…

This post was authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Tom Schoellhammer and Emmanuel Tacheau The threat landscape is ever changing and adversaries are always working to find more efficient ways to compromise users. One of the many ways that users are driven to malicious content is through m…

Authors: William Largent, Jaeson Schultz, Craig Williams. Special thanks to Richard Harman for his contributions to this post. As consumers, we are constantly bombarded by advertising, especially on the World Wide Web. There is a lot of money to be made either pushing Internet traffic, or displaying…

This post was authored by Fred Concklin, William Largent,  Martin Rehak,  Michal Svoboda, and Veronica Valeros. During an average day of surfing the web via computer, smartphones, and tablets, we are constantly deluged by advertising. Total annual Internet advertising revenue will approach $200bn by…

Adversaries are committed to continually refining or developing new techniques to conceal malicious activity, decrease their reliance on other techniques that may be more detectable, and become increasingly more efficient and effective in their attacks. Below are just three examples—explored in deta…

If you read the recently released Cisco Annual Security Report, you will have learned how spammers have adopted a “Snowshoe” strategy, using a large number of IP addresses with a low message volume per IP address, to send spam, preventing some spam systems from sinking the spam. This yielded a 250 p…